“But the fact is that Larry Bird is one of the most talented players to ever have played the game. “There might be a little of that,” Chamberlain said. An interviewer asked the late, great Wilt Chamberlain if Bird’s popularity had anything to do with his being Caucasian. One of the YouTube segments that I’ve watched addressed that issue. Could Bird’s popularity have something to do with that? The number of white super stars is considerably smaller. Most of the big stars in the NBA currently and throughout history are black. It seems like there is a new appreciation of Bird these days, and I’ve heard speculation that it is racial in nature. And in due time I came to appreciate Johnson, both as a man and as a player.īut there was something special about Bird who went on to play for the Boston Celtics in the NBA, so I continued to be an admirer. Magic Johnson went on to have an outstanding NBA career with the Los Angeles Lakers. Right on the spot I became a Larry Bird fan. Listening to the “experts” crow about how they knew that would be the outcome was too much for me to take. Johnson outscored Bird and Michigan State won by 11. The noisy clamor was all about Michigan State and Magic Johnson and how no one, especially a bunch of hicks from the Missouri Valley were going to beat the best of the Big 10.Īs it turned out, Johnson and Michigan State were the winners. In that game I was rooting hard for Indiana State, largely because it was a heavy underdog and one thing that turns me off is the loud pronouncements of TV’s talking heads about one team or another not having any chance to win. They had Bird and a shooting guard named Carl Nicks, who were superb players and the Sycamores made it all the way to the title game against Magic Johnson and Michigan State. The Sycamores, which share the spotlight with the Ohio State Buckeyes as having seeds for mascots, finished the season unbeaten, but very few experts believed they were good enough to win the NCAA championship. Indiana State was considered a small school, even though it competed in the Missouri Valley and was a Division I outfit. Bird had existed beneath the radar for me until about midway through the 1978-79 season, when the Indiana State team he played for was embarking on what would be an unbeaten regular year. I was like a lot of other basketball fans during the 1978-79 season. I have almost always have considered myself a fan of Bird’s dating back to the 1979 NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Recently a large number of stories about basketball legend Larry Bird have been popping up on my YouTube feed.

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